While I am not big on defending telcos, let's not forget that they are under enormous price pressure (for the fibre backbone essentially they need to double available throughput every 18 month or so without increasing cost) at the same time it's the software/service companies who really made enormous profits based on these developments, while data capacity is becoming more and more a commodity.

man, can you imagine if we had payed some telcos money to drop fiber that they never did?

Still waiting on Centurylink (or whatever they rebranded to now) to start on their piece of that "bridge to the 21st century". Not holding breath. 3Mb/.5Mb, at a cool $50/month. :-O

When they figure a way to bill users differently between "long-distance" and "local" packet transmissions, they can start to see applications/services put in effort to adapt.

Also, mechanisms like L4S for high-fidelity ECN feedback allow for higher link utilizations without end-to-end QoS impact.

IPv6 reducing routing table fragmentation should enable reasonable prefix based peering, along with billing senders according to the used peering. We don't need fast flat rates, we need cheap bulk traffic and flat rates for effectively-not-oversubscribed bandwidth. Maybe with a way to roll over unused priority bandwidth at some multiple into the next billing period to count against that period's bulk traffic usage.

That is because data capacity is a commodity, and should earn profit margins of near zero, like any utility does.

Also, no one asked ATT to lose billions of dollars by buying Time Warner HBO and DirecTV. Or Verizon with Yahoo.

But they wanted to chase that Comcast vertical monopoly dream. And it will never yield any utility for customers.

imo Telcos have delivered jack shit in terms of "developments" except extract rent from their monopoly positions.